3 Habits That Help Students Understand Poetry

Tackling unseen poetry is simultaneously one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of the English language arts classroom. It’s rewarding because students get the chance to read the poem entirely on their own terms, largely unmediated by teacher guidance, and it’s challenging for exactly the same reason.

If poetry is like a house, as Emily Dickinson once remarked, then for many students unseen poetry can often feel like groping around in a dark room. They try and struggle, to cling onto its words. Stumbling from line to line, it just doesn’t seem to make any sense. 

In this article, I want to share with you three habits that students can deploy to unlock unseen poetry. These are all strategies I use in my own English teaching, and each one has helped my students gain confidence and clarity when digging into an entirely new poem they have never encountered before.

If understanding poetry can sometimes feel like being in a darkened room, each strategy is like flipping a light switch. Word by word and line by line, the poem becomes a little bit more illuminated. Build these habits into your own classrooms to help students gain increased expertise in tackling unseen poetry.

Habit 1: IdentifyinG Tension

Poems operate through compression. They’re the product of heightened language compacted into a small space, even when they’re long. They need to say a lot with a little.

Poems often revolve around a central tension or conflict. This tension becomes the linguistic and thematic backbone of the poem, signaling to the reader the main concerns in as compressed a way as possible.

Get students to look out for this tension from the opening line. If they spot it—and there’ll often be one—then grappling with the rest of the poem becomes a lot easier.

Imagine, for instance, that students were given Lawrence Dunbar’s incredibly moving poem “Sympathy.” They would be met with this opening line: “I know what the caged bird feels.” A student who has been inducted into the habit of looking for tensions might immediately notice the juxtaposition between “caged” and “bird.” This might conjure in their minds a sense of entrapment versus freedom, sorrow versus happiness. Having this insight then helps to unlock the rest of the poem. 

Given that these kinds of tensions are often announced within the first couple of lines, get into the routine of showing students only opening lines to the poems they’re studying. Ask them to be alert to any kind of conflict or tension. Over time, they’ll quickly get into the habit of looking for this whenever they’re given a new unseen poem. You could even explicitly teach some of the most common tensions, such as light/dark, freedom/entrapment, joy/sorrow, and so on.

Habit 2: SEEING Neon Lines

In a previous Edutopia article, I talked about the idea of looking for “neon lines” as a way into poetry. This phrase comes from British poet Simon Armitage, who once remarked that every poem has a “neon line,” which, he explained, is “one line in a poem that seems to be flashing on and off.” Getting students into the habit of looking for neon lines is a great way to help them grapple with unseen poetry. As the name implies, once it’s found, the poem becomes that little bit brighter. 

Inculcating this habit into students in the classroom doesn’t need to be complicated. Quite the opposite, in fact. Show them a poem, but just for 10 seconds or so. Now ask them to scribble down on paper any words or images that they can remember. These are their neon lines: the words or phrases that pulse a bit more. Get students to reflect on what they find interesting or special about their chosen line. And then, with this in mind, ask them to reread the entire poem, thinking carefully about how this one line helps to illuminate the rest.

This might seem odd (why not, after all, just get them to read the whole poem?), but it really does work. No doubt there’s some interesting cognitive science involved, but in my experience, forcing students to artificially constrict and funnel their attention in this way almost always results in their identifying the most interesting lines of a poem. They remember, subconsciously, the most salient bits of the poem. And this is exactly where they should begin their analysis.

habit 3: USING Form to Make Inferences

Students often reduce form to identifying rhyme scheme or spotting a sonnet. However, one easily overlooked—but extremely powerful—aspect of form is the physical look of the poem on the page.

Don Paterson memorably describes the form of a poem as being “shaped by pressured silence.” He has in mind the way the white of the page presses into the black of the words. The typographic imprint of a poem reveals so much about its mood, and—useful for tackling unseen poetry—it does so with a single glance.

One way to make sure students are attuned to this is to present them with blocked-out poems. Take this example from Marianne Moore’s poem “The Fish”:

Here, students might notice the jagged flow of the lines; their sporadic yet patterned cutting into the page; the way they seem to descend and then pull back. Even before reading the poem, students develop a feel for the kind of poem it might be. If they’re right, the form reinforces, but if they’re wrong, then the form subverts. Either way, they have a fascinating way into the poem.

Getting students used to looking at the poem before reading it is just another way to help flip that switch. And the more they do it, the more it yields interesting things to say.

Unseen poetry offers students the best kind of challenge and, if approached in the right way, the best kind of reward. Over the many years that I’ve used exactly these strategies—and others like them—I’ve seen firsthand how they’ve helped students shift from confusion to confidence. Start building these habits in your own classrooms, and enjoy seeing the room get that little bit brighter.